by Dan Abnett
He looked at me.
‘I thought we had an understanding, Mamzel Beta Bequin,’ he said. ‘I thought you understood that you belong to the Children now.’
‘Please…’ I began.
‘You belong to the Children. I have come to take you back so that we can continue our business together.’
Still smiling, he raised a warning finger.
‘No bad words now. No pariah tricks. Come with me. Or I will kill him and maim you.’
I truly wished I had the word, but since I had said it to him in the ancient house, it had fled from my memory again and could not be recovered.
He took a step towards us. He reached out his hand to me. Where the rain ran off his gleaming armour it looked like blood.
Lightburn snatched out his revolver and aimed it at Teke.
‘Renner, don’t!’ I cried. ‘He will kill you.’
‘If I don’t, I’d better just kill myself!’ Renner snarled back.
‘Would you do that?’ asked Teke. ‘Could you? Save me the effort?’
Then Teke vanished. Something smashed into him from the side and ripped him out of our line of sight. It was as though he had been ploughed down by a runaway tram. Lightburn and I flinched at the impact and ran to look.
Deathrow the warblind had the monster on the ground, his hands around Teke’s throat. Deathrow was almost as big as the warrior of the Emperor’s Children. He was systematically bashing the Traitor Marine’s head against the pavement of the filthy slum alley. Rain hosed down over them both. I heard the buzz of his optic visor.
Teke rallied and smashed the warblind off him with a formidable punch. The impact of powered fist on plate armour made a sound like a safe door slamming. Deathrow left the ground and smashed into the wall behind him, cracking ancient, soot-frail bricks.
Teke was up, rushing the warblind. His ribbons were swords. His smile became a killing rictus.
The cattle dog bounded out of the side street and stormed into him, seizing his left wrist in its massive jaws. The warrior of the Emperor’s Children howled out in dismay. It was not a cry of pain. He simply seemed revolted at the thought of being touched by a vermin dog. He lashed out and sent the animal flying across the yard.
But the dog had bought Deathrow time. The killgang chief had drawn his oil-dark broadsword. He came at Teke and they clashed. The huge, oiled blade met and blocked both of the darting golden longswords. Sparks flew. I heard both warriors grunt with effort as they traded potentially lethal strokes and thrusts. Teke had the clear advantage. The killgang chief was supernaturally strong. I knew this well enough. But he was not in the same class as the Traitor Astartes. Teke would kill him. He would outstroke and outfight him. His swordsmanship was far greater.
The Smiling One landed a terrible, scouring blow that seemed to rip part of Deathrow’s visor and face-plating away. Deathrow’s head snapped to the side. I saw fluids spurt into the rain. Cables tore out and fizzled. Deathrow staggered backwards, leaking blood, the side of his head mangled.
Teke closed for the kill.
But he paused. He had seen something. Something had stopped him in his tracks.
I realised he had glimpsed Deathrow’s face behind the ruptured visor.
‘How–?’ he began.
The distraction was momentary, but the Smiling One had dropped his guard.
Deathrow plunged his sword into the gap. The oiled black blade went through the Traitor Marine’s belly and shredded out through the back plating of his armour. Blood spattered onto the wet pavement behind him, black as pitch. Shorn servos shorted out.
Teke screamed. This time it truly was pain. It was pain and outrage and horror.
Teke tore himself off the blade impaling him, and lurched back across the yard. Black blood was gushing from his wound and mingling with the rain. His face was ashen. He was still smiling.
He turned, and the night took him. It was as if the blackness and the rain had conspired to become a curtain to allow his exit. Teke left no trace behind but a few pink rose petals floating on the gurgling pools around the drain.
Deathrow sank to his knees, breathing hard. He kept his back to us. He raised his hands to his face and tried to push his damaged visor back together.
I took a step towards him. The cattle dog trotted up and stood between us. It glared at me, but not unkindly.
‘Deathrow?’ I said.
The dog growled. Beta.
‘Can I help? You are hurt. Let me…’
The dog growled again. A negative.
‘You saved us. You saved me again.’
The dog remained silent.
‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance this day,’ I said.
I looked at Lightburn. He gestured urgently at me to follow and get away.
I stopped and looked back at Deathrow.
‘You’re one of his, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘You’re one of Eisenhorn’s specialists. He sent you to shadow me.’
There was no answer.
‘Didn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ said Deathrow.
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
He rose to his feet and turned to look at me. I saw that the visor was smashed and hanging off, and part of the scarred and ridged tissue of his face was torn away. But it was a mask. There was another face beneath it, a face that Teke’s blow had partially exposed.
I could not see it clearly, but even in the gloom I could tell that it was handsome and noble.
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
He looked at me for a moment.
‘I am Alpharius,’ he said.
He turned, and he and his dog were quickly lost in the downpour.
It continued to rain, but we carried on walking. We cared about only one kind of shelter. I began to regret the very essence of my life. I felt I should walk down to the marshlands where, allegedly, I had come from, and lie down upon the wet grave that I had been told belonged to my mother, and die there. Just lie there and let the elements claim me so I could stop being the centre of this madness. I had become a grail. I had become the thing all these various, lethal parties were questing for. In all the grail myths, I wondered if anyone had ever given a second thought to how the grail felt about it all.
The oblivion appealed, but it was based on a lie too. The fact of me coming from the marshlands and the shipyards south of Toilgate was just a useful story that had been concocted to make my life make sense. It was just a role. My mother, if I could believe Eisenhorn’s retainers, had been lost on a ship in the warp. Only my name seemed genuine. Bequin: just a word. A single word was all I had been left with.
We walked for an hour more, and did not speak. The rain plastered our clothes to our skins. The city seemed empty, for the rain had driven most residents indoors. It felt like the lights had been switched off and the stone jumble of it had been evacuated so it could be hosed clean ready for the morning and the next set of actors and the next roles to play out.
Lightburn led me across Lunar Street, the great boulevard running through Parashoy district, and up towards Coalgate. He had taken me the long way round. The trees behind the black railings in Parashoy Park whispered in the heavy rain.
‘Here we are,’ he said.
We crossed the thoroughfare, past shuttered commercial properties and a tavern that was lit within. Across a cobbled yard lay a large, old building. It had been built in the classic Orphaeonic style, with columns and a portico. Its windows were blind. It had long been disused. Dirt caked it and chains held its doors shut. It was a dead place. It was a blind box that contained unknown contents.
‘Here?’ I asked.
He nodded, and we approached the doors, moving up the worn steps and under the portico. Rain dripped from the stone frieze. It smelled of damp and the garbage nests of vagrants.
Lightburn went to the doors and pulled away the rusted chains that trapped the handles. He shoulder-shoved one of the doors open, a bit at a time, until there was enough room to climb through.
>
It had been a hospital once, a teaching hospital for the College Medicae. It had been closed for perhaps sixty years. We passed through a gloomy hallway, and into a large, tiled chamber littered with old, mouldering textbooks and scattered pages of patient records. On two of the huge walls hung thousands of group picts, each one a graduating class of young medicae students. The picts had become so stained one could no longer make out the faces. There were three banks of rotting chairs. I wasn’t sure if they had been a waiting area, or were arranged for an audience to sit in while degrees were bestowed.
Lightburn walked along one wall, counting off the stone urns that stood there. He got to the fourth, reached in, and pulled out a small tracker unit.
‘This is how I tell her we’re here,’ he said, and activated it. A green light on the little unit began to flash excitedly.
‘How long?’ I asked.
‘You know as much as I do now,’ he said.
We waited. It was uncomfortably dark and damp. I heard the rain pattering on the roof, and heard the louder, clearer drops of water falling inside the place, through cracks onto tiled floors. I wondered how many lives had been saved by this building over the centuries. How many medicae had it trained and produced? How many lives had they gone out into the Imperium to change and save?
I wondered if, although in its dotage, the building might yet save my life.
I wondered what I would say to Mam Mordaunt when she arrived. I wondered who else of the Maze Undue had survived that terrible night. I realised I was excited at the thought of seeing them again. They were a life I understood. I wondered if this was simple familiarity, the promise of a security that I had relied upon for so long. Or was it some insidious Cognitae conditioning, renewing my sense of loyalty as I anticipated seeing them?
Was I too much Cognitae? Was it my base nature? For all my declarations, was it likely that I would not renounce it when the time came?
I certainly had bargaining chips that would make me valuable to the Cognitae. I was an asset. I could tell them about at least two Inquisitorial operations, and some details of their composition and intent, and could tell them about Blackwards, about the Ecclesiarchy and their unwise pact with the Traitor Marines, about Alace Quatorze the erstwhile Glaw, the extimate nature of her house on the borderlands, and the malicious intent of the Emperor’s Children.
During my flight, my Hajara, during my improvised escape back through previous functions and past roles, I had learned a great deal that I could use as leverage for my own security.
I began to pace. Lightburn watched me. He was nervous too.
I went to the door at the far end of the chamber and opened it. He followed me. On the other side was a spectacular room. It was the teaching hospital teatro anatomica, a steep chamber of six concentric circular viewing platforms with ornate nalwood balustrades that looked down on the operating station on the ground floor. Down there, where we stood, dissections and other demonstrations would be made for the edification of the students packing the galleries above.
Water dripped from the roof. Bodies had been taken apart here in the name of science and for the furtherance of human knowledge. I was reminded that for all the lives the teaching hospital might have saved, it had been necessary to use lives up. People had died here too, and their anatomies had been consumed by science. Only from death may life continue. Only out of sacrifice can the future arise. Sometimes one must donate things that are very precious for the greater good.
After all the roles that I had been bred and trained to play, I could not help but notice how ironically appropriate it was that this reunion should take place in an empty theatre.
‘She’s here,’ said Lightburn from just behind me.
I looked up and saw her coming down the wooden staircase from the galleries above us. I think I was expecting to hear the swish of expensive spider silk.
‘Renner, that’s not her,’ I said.
‘It is,’ the Curst insisted. ‘That is the woman who placed this burden upon me. That is the woman called Eusebe who told me to bring you here.’
It was not Eusebe Mordaunt. I drew my laslock and armed it. Lightburn looked at the weapon in confused dismay. Either he had tricked me, or he had been tricked, and from his look of surprise I suspected the latter.
The woman reached the ground floor and faced us.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ I warned, and aimed the laslock.
‘Or what?’ asked Patience Kys. ‘Will you kill me again?’
CHAPTER 41
Which concerns the 41st Millennium
She was beautiful, as beautiful as I remembered her from that night in the attics of the Maze Undue when I had known her only by the name Tharpe and the title Sister. She was tall, and her athletic form was sheathed in a fitted bodyglove of brown leather. Framed by the hard angles of her cheekbones, her green eyes burned with the fury of Deathrow’s targeting optics. Her jet-black hair, black as Old Night, was held in a tight bun by a single silver pin.
‘Put away your weapon, Beta Bequin,’ she said. ‘It’s time to talk.’
‘Is this not the woman?’ Lightburn asked.
‘No,’ I snapped.
‘I did not trick you, I swear!’ he cried, most put out.
‘I know,’ I said.
Lightburn drew his revolver and took a step towards the woman.
‘Why have you played me this way? You have used me!’ he cried.
‘Enough,’ said Kys. ‘Both of you put aside your guns. I am not joking, Beta. It is not an offer I usually extend to people who have tried to kill me.’
‘How did you live?’ I asked.
‘He caught me.’
‘He? Who?’ I asked.
‘My master.’
‘How could he catch you? No man could stop a fall from so high.’
‘He did it with his mind,’ said Kys. ‘You have no idea of the powers that are moving around you, have you? No idea. No idea of the league you suddenly find yourself in. For the last time, put away the guns.’
Her mention of mind-power jogged me out of my shock. Still aiming, I reached for my cuff. I could block her. I could blank her and her psykana master and–
The cuff would not turn.
Frantic, I fired instead. The shot went wild. The laslock pistol flew up out of my hand and somersaulted into one of the higher galleries. Lightburn’s gun also made a premature exit from his grip. It went away through the air, spinning, the chamber cracking open and the bullets popping out one by one to orbit the floating gun like a clutch of moons around a parent planet.
Kys launched herself at me. I felt myself being lifted off my feet, as if a great wind had gathered up under me, or as if a giant hand had picked me up. I crashed back against the nalwood balustrade of the first gallery ring, pinned. I struggled, reaching for my blade or my hold-out piece. Both went flying away from me: found, removed and tossed aside by invisible fingers.
With a roar, Lightburn went for Kys, trying to intercept her. She shoved him back with her telekinetic force, dead set on me. When he picked himself up and went to come at her again, a second figure appeared, leaping down from the higher rails. It was another woman, shorter than Kys and more curvaceous, with short red hair. She landed like a cat and tackled the burdener. He fought her, but she blocked every one of his quick, angry swings and punches. She got his arm, turned him in a headlock, kicked away his legs and put him on the floor, pinned and helpless. He howled.
‘Be quiet,’ the woman told him.
Kys had reached me. I tried to fight her off, but she had me pressed against the wooden rails. I tried again and again to twist my cuff, to turn it off, to kill the limiter. It would not turn.
‘Stop it,’ said Kys. ‘Stop it.’
I fought.
‘The first thing I did was lock that cuff tight with my mind,’ said Kys. ‘You think I want to be blanked by you again? You think I’d come to face you knowing you could block my mind?’
‘Have you got her?�
� called the woman with her knee in Lightburn’s spine.
‘Yes,’ said Kys. She looked at me, tilting her head to one side.
‘Stop fighting. Things will go better for you.’
I snarled something.
‘I can do this all day,’ she said. ‘You are detained as a prisoner of the Inquisition, and I suggest you accept that and start acting accordingly.’
Her mind reached into my coat. It plucked out the little blue commonplace book. Kys put out her hand and took the book from the air. She flicked through it.
‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘This seems to be an original copy of Chase’s lunatic jottings. A heretical text. Very rare. Where did you get it?’
I said nothing.
‘This is a dangerous book to own, Beta,’ she said. ‘It says a lot about the sort of person who would carry it around, and nothing good. This is a black mark as far as the Inquisition is concerned. A very black mark indeed. We may have to revise our appraisal of you.’
‘I was given it!’ I snapped. ‘I haven’t even read it! I don’t understand the cipher.’
She pursed her lips.
‘No one does,’ she remarked. ‘He’s been trying to unpick it for years. Of course, he hasn’t had an original to work from before. Maybe it’s a good sign that you can’t.’
Her mind reached into my pockets again, and pulled out the bent silver pin. She floated it up into the air between our faces and hovered it.
‘I’ve been missing this,’ she said. To demonstrate the sheer coercive power of her mind, she straightened the kink in the pin. Then she let it float up, rotate, and slide down into the chignon in perfect symmetry with the other pin.
‘Why did you keep it?’ she asked.
‘Why would you care?’ I replied.
‘He wants us,’ the other woman called out. ‘He’s calling for us.’
‘I heard,’ said Kys. She looked at me. ‘Are you going to behave?’ she asked. ‘You’ve no real reason to trust me, I know, but I want you to understand that things will go very much better for you if you cooperate. He’s tired. He will not have time for games.’
